West Ham United comfortably beat Southampton 4-1 away from home in the Carabao Cup. 

After an underwhelming start to the season, and a poor start to proceedings last night, West Ham will be feeling a lot better about themselves after beating the Saints last night.

It was a poor first 10/15 minutes, a few players looked rusty and Southampton took advantage of that. They opened the scoring ten minutes in through Scienza, but didn’t make the rest of their opportunities count.

Once the likes of Golambeckis, Mayers, Kante, Ajala, and Piroe settled after a challenging start we really clicked into gear. Veltman, Orford, Piroe, Ajala and Golambeckis especially really stood out to us fans.

We were all worried after going a goal down, but as Golambeckis said in his interview post match “Playing with six academy boys made it much easier. No-one’s heads went down after they went 1-0 up. I think we just stuck together.”

It was really refreshing to see, we’ve become used to the team not playing as a unit, losing their heads as soon as we concede, throwing the game plan out the window. The team last night changed from that, and a lot of that is down to the youth players. 

They didn’t lose their heads, kept to the game plan and it paid off, the shackles looked like they were gone and the players could express themselves. Let’s hope Nuno takes this into Saturday as we face a very winnable trip to Vicarage Road to face Watford. 

Taty and Bowen coming on in such a positive environment and both scoring is going to be a huge confidence boost for them, Taty is now up to three goals for the season and Bowen is off the mark, hopefully this is an spring board for them to start tearing the Championship apart like we expected. 

Even though it was in the cup, this one win has completely changed the outlook of Hammers fans. That could be undone just as easily with more defence-first approach tactics at Watford, but let’s hope this win has made Nuno realise he can be more expansive with the amount of talent he has at his disposal in a now weaker league. 

This win was exactly what the football club needed. It’s time to build on it!